Transcript Document

American Literature
030533/4/5, 19th Dec. 2006
Lecture Sixteen
The American Post-Modernism
(I)
(1945 - 2000)
American Poetry Since 1945:
the Anti-tradition
 Experimental poetry:
1)
Experimentation is one aspect of all Modernist and Postmodernist
poetry, but experimental poetry makes a special point of
innovation, sometimes in the belief that current poetry is
stereotyped and inadequate, but more often for its own sake.
Experimentation in the arts is nothing like its counterpart in
science, however, and there are no theories to correspond with
observations, fit in with other theories, or broadly make sense.
Even such concepts as foregrounding and defamiliarization, basic
to much literary theorizing, are more taken as articles of faith
than properly established. Experimental poetry can be intriguing
and pleasing, but it is not poetry as commonly understood by the
term, and has therefore to be judged on different grounds, most
commonly those of the visual arts, which it increasingly
resembles.
2)
3)
The force behind Lowell’s mature achievement and much of
contemporary poetry lies in the experimentation begun in the 1950s
by a number of poets. They may be divided into five loose schools,
identified by Donald Allen in his The New American Poetry (1960),
the first anthology to present the work of poets who were previously
neglected by the critical and academic communities.
Inspired by jazz and abstract expressionist painting, most of the
experimental writers are a generation younger than Lowell. They
have tended to be bohemian, counter-culture intellectuals who
disassociated themselves from universities and outspokenly
criticized "bourgeois" American society. Their poetry is daring,
original, and sometimes shocking. In its search for new values, it
claims affinity with the archaic world of myth, legend, and
traditional societies such as those of the American Indian. The
forms are looser, more spontaneous, organic; they arise from the
subject matter and the feeling of the poet as the poem is written, and
from the natural pauses of the spoken language. As Allen Ginsberg
noted in "Improvised Poetics," "first thought best thought."
1.

The Black Mountain School
The Black Mountain School centered around Black Mountain
College an experimental liberal arts college in Asheville, North
Carolina, where poets Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and
Robert Creeley taught in the early 1950s. Ed Dorn, Joel
Oppenheimer, and Jonathan Williams studied there, and Paul
Blackburn, Larry Eigner, and Denise Levertov published work
in the school's magazines, Origin and the Black Mountain
Review. The Black Mountain School is linked with Charles
Olson's theory of "projective verse," which insisted on an open
form based on the spontaneity of the breath pause in speech and
the typewriter line in writing.
2. The San Francisco School

The work of the San Francisco School -- which includes most
West Coast poetry in general -- owes much to Eastern
philosophy and religion, as well as to Japanese and Chinese
poetry. This is not surprising because the influence of the
Orient has always been strong in the U.S. West. The land
around San Francisco -- the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the
jagged seacoast -- is lovely and majestic, and poets from that
area tend to have a deep feeling for nature. Many of their
poems are set in the mountains or take place on backpacking
trips. The poetry looks to nature instead of literary tradition as
a source of inspiration.


San Francisco poets include Jack Spicer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Robert Duncan, Phil Whalen, Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, Kenneth
Rexroth, Joanne Kyger, and Diane diPrima. Many of these poets
identify with working people. Their poetry is often simple,
accessible, and optimistic.
At its best, as seen in the work of Gary Snyder (1930- ), San
Francisco poetry evokes the delicate balance of the individual and
the cosmos. In Snyder's "Above Pate Valley" (1955), the poet
describes working on a trail crew in the mountains and finding
obsidian arrowhead flakes from vanished Indian tribes:
On a hill snowed all but summer
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousand years.
3. Beat Poets
1)
2)
The San Franciso School blends into the next grouping -- the
"Beat" poets, who emerged in the 1950s. Most of the important
Beats (beatniks) migrated to San Francisco from the East Coast,
gaining their initial national recognition in California. Major Beat
writers have included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack
Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Beat poetry is oral, repetitive,
and immensely effective in readings, largely because it developed
out of poetry readings in underground clubs. Some might
correctly see it as a great-grandparent of the rap music that
became prevalent in the 1990s.
Beat poetry was the most anti-establishment form of literature in
the United States, but beneath its shocking words lies a love of
country. The poetry is a cry of pain and rage at what the poets see
as the loss of America's innocence and the tragic waste of its
human and material resources.
3)
Poems like Allen Ginsberg's revolutionized traditional poetry:
Howl (1956)
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...
4. The New York School
1) Unlike the Beat and San Franciso poets, the poets of the
New York School are not interested in overtly moral
questions, and, in general, they steer clear of political
issues. They have the best formal educations of any
group.
2) The major figures of the New York School -- John
Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch -- met while
they were undergraduates at Harvard University. They
are quintessentially urban, cool, nonreligious, witty with
a poignant, pastel sophistication. Their poems are fast
moving, full of urban detail, incongruity, and an almost
palpable sense of suspended belief.
3)
4)
New York City is the fine arts center of America and the
birthplace of Abstract Expressionism, a major inspiration of this
poetry. Most of the poets worked as art reviewers or museum
curators, or collaborated with painters. Perhaps because of their
feeling for abstract art, which distrusts figurative shapes and
obvious meanings, their work is often difficult to comprehend, as
in the later work of John Ashbery (1927- ), perhaps the most
influential poet writing today.
Ashbery's fluid poems record thoughts and emotions as they
wash over the mind too swiftly for direct articulation. His
profound, long poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975),
which won three major prizes, glides from thought to thought,
often reflecting back on itself:
A ship
Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor.
You are allowing extraneous matters
To break up your day...
5.
1)
2)
Surrealism and Existentialism
In his anthology defining the new schools, Donald Allen includes
a fifth group he cannot define because it has no clear
geographical underpinning. This vague group includes recent
movements and experiments. Chief among these are surrealism,
which expresses the unconscious through vivid dreamlike
imagery, and much poetry by women and ethnic minorities that
has flourished in recent years. Though superficially distinct,
surrealists, feminists, and minorities appear to share a sense of
alienation from white, male, mainstream literature.
Although T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound had
introduced symbolist techniques into American poetry in the
1920s, surrealism, the major force in European poetry and
thought in Europe during and after World War II, did not take
root in the United States. Not until the 1960s did surrealism
(along with existentialism) become domesticated in America
under the stress of the Vietnam conflict.
3)
4)
5)
During the 1960s, many American writers -- W.S. Merwin,
Robert Bly, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, and Mark Strand,
among others -- turned to French and especially Spanish
surrealism for its pure emotion, its archetypal images, and its
models of anti- rational, existential unrest.
Surrealists like Merwin tend to be epigrammatic, as in lines such
as: "The gods are what has failed to become of us / If you find
you no longer believe enlarge the temple."
Bly's political surrealism harshly criticized American values and
foreign policy during the Vietnam era in poems like "The Teeth
Mother Naked at Last":
It's because we have new packaging
for smoked oysters
that bomb holes appear in the rice
paddies
6) The more pervasive surrealist influence has been
quieter and more contemplative, like the poem
Charles Wright describes in "The New Poem" (1973):
 It will not attend our sorrow.
It will not console our children.
It will not be able to help us.
6) Mark Strand's surrealism, like Merwin's, is often
bleak; it speaks of an extreme deprivation. Now
that traditions, values, and beliefs have failed him,
the poet has nothing but his own cavelike soul:
 I have a key
So I open the door and walk in.
It is dark and I walk in.
It is darker and I walk in.
American Prose
Since 1945: Realism and Experimentation
I.
The Realist Legacy and the Late 1940s
1)
As in the first half of the 20th century, fiction in the second half
reflects the character of each decade. The late 1940s saw the
aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.
World War II offered prime material: Norman Mailer (The
Naked and the Dead, 1948) and James Jones (From Here to
Eternity, 1951) were two writers who used it best. Both of them
employed realism verging on grim naturalism; both took pains
not to glorify combat. The same was true for Irwin Shaw's The
Young Lions (1948). Herman Wouk, in The Caine Mutiny
(1951), also showed that human foibles were as evident in
wartime as in civilian life.
2)
3)
4)
Later, Joseph Heller cast World War II in satirical and absurdist
terms (Catch-22, 1961), arguing that war is laced with insanity.
Thomas Pynchon presented an involuted, brilliant case parodying
and displacing different versions of reality (Gravity's Rainbow,
1973); and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., became one of the shining lights of
the counterculture during the early 1970s following publication
of Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade (1969), his
antiwar novel about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by
Allied forces during World War II (which he witnessed on the
ground as a prisoner of war).
The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contingent of writers,
including poet-novelist-essayist Robert Penn Warren, dramatists
Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and short story writers
Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty. All but Miller were
from the South. All explored the fate of the individual within the
family or community and focused on the balance between
personal growth and responsibility to the group.
Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
1)
2)
3)
4)
Katherine Anne Porter was an American short-story writer who had
her greatest success with her only novel, the allegorical epic Ship of
Fools (1962). Setting aboard a German ship shortly before Hitler’s
accession to power, the novel is a moral allegory that attempts to
recreate the atmosphere of a world on the brink of disaster.
Raised by her grandmother in Texas and Louisiana, Porter's young
life was famously colorful and included three failed marriages,
travels in Europe and Mexico and a stint as a journalist.
Her first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas, was published
in 1930 and launched her career as a well-regarded practioner of the
form. Her stories have been praised for their technical
accomplishments in matters of style, form, and language.
She wrote ‘Hacienda, a Story of Mexico' (1934); ‘Noon Wine'
(1937) . Her other acclaimed collections include Pale Horse, Pale
Rider (1939) , a collection of three novellas; The Leaning Tower
(1944) , The Days Before (1952), a collection of her essays and
occasional pieces; and 1965's The Collected Stories of Katherine
Anne Porter (winner of the National Book Award).
Eudora Welty (1909 - 2001)
1)
2)
3)
One of the important American regional writers of the 20th cent.
and one of the finest short-story writers of any time or place, a
small town or rural Mississippi is the setting for a large majority
of her stories.
However, the characters include murderers, psychotics, suicides,
deaf-mutes, the mentally retarded and the senile. Welty's cast of
characters may also include a multitude of people who used to be
referred to as "common" by the southern upper class. Her
characters are comic, eccentric, often grotesque, but nonetheless
charming; their reality is augmented by Welty’s fierce wit and
her skill at capturing their dialect and speech patterns.
Among her collections of short stories are A Curtain of Green
(1941), The Wide Net (1943), and The Bride of Innisfallen (1955).
Her collected stories were published in 1980, the same year she
was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
5)
6)
7)
8)
Welty’s novels include Delta Wedding (1946), The Ponder Heart
(1954; dramatized 1956), Losing Battles (1970), and The
Optimist’s Daughter (1972; Pulitzer Prize), about the
contemporary loosening of home and family ties and its effect on
grief, love, and the acknowledgment of loss.
Welty never married.
Welty has received four O. Henry Memorial prizes, the M. Carey
Thomas Award from Bryn Mawr College, the Brandeis Medal of
Achievement, the Hollins medal, and the 1st Annual Award of
Excellence from the Mississippi Arts Commission (Donald)
Her complete novels appeared in 1998. She also published a
novella, The Robber Bridegroom (1942); a collection of her
photographs of Mississippi in the 1930s, One Time: One Place
(1972); and numerous essays and reviews.